I wish to repeat the following in this House with regard to the homicide which occurred following a fight on Wednesday 9th December outside the Doris Johnson Senior High School:

An unspeakable tragedy has struck the Fox Hill constituency and community yet again. A child is dead. Other children are suspected in the killing. All of them are from families that care for them. All families are suffering.

I join in the grieving for my constituents and the community of Fox Hill; I extend my condolences to the family of the dead child and to the Doris Johnson school: the children, the teachers and staff, the principal, the school board. This is very sad.
I will continue to use my best endeavours to try to keep the peace.

Following that statement, I visited with all of the public schools in the Fox Hill constituency or that serve the Fox Hill constituency. The children involved in this matter including the victim all live in the Fox Hill area if not the Fox Hill constituency. I have tried to see the parents and the teachers.

You can imagine for Fox Hill what this means in the context of the shootings and killings of the last two years in this community. On 27th December 2013, four people were shot down dead on the Freedom Park in Fox hill waiting for the Junkanoo results. Now the killing is extended from the adults into the children.

I want to express my thanks to the Minister of Education, the Director and his staff, the teachers and the headmasters, especially James Clarke who is the headmaster at Doris Johnson for all they do to keep the peace in our schools and for training our children. I visited with Mr. Clarke, spoke to his teachers and then went to Sandilands Primary and to L. W. Young.

In our constituency as I suspect throughout the country, there is a profound reexamination and soul searching of what we can do to avoid this kind of tragedy from happening again. I have my own theories. Indeed I have been preaching the gospel of what to do since at least 1986 when we could have foreseen the enormity of the issue that was coming down the road. Urgent action of some kind is needed and one suspects that going forward the society will respond to allocate the resources needed to tackle this problem.

At the request of the Principal of St Augustine’s College the nearby Catholic and therefore private school, I visited last week to speak to them about what had happened. Many children throughout the country were traumatized by the images of the fight and the subsequent death. In response, the postings on Facebook and Twitter were numerous.

This is a different era and deaths of this kind are often in your face and instant in all its full horror. Within minutes the images are available on our phones and sent around the country and around the world. This tends to demean victims and to desensitize those of us who are left behind to the horrors of homicide and death in those circumstances.

The point I made to them, is a point I wish to repeat this morning. As much as we are saddened, shocked and traumatized by all the images it would be unfair to blame them, all young people as a generation. I do not blame them as a generation. There is no collective condemnation of young people. I told them they should not see things that way. Each individual in life has to accept responsibility for their own decisions. Those who killed the young man are responsible for his death, not the generation of young people. In the meantime I asked them to soldier on; to get the best education they can; continue to do the things that make for peace and build up the common life.

In that mission of doing the best they can and in doing the things that make for peace and building up the common life, I am sure that the generation coming behind us have the support of each of the leaders of this country today.

I extend my condolences to the mother and father of the deceased young man Adonai and to his wider family.

I thank you Mr. Speaker.